ERRATA SLIP NUBMER TWO
Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November-December 1978.
Foreword to Readers:
The Encyclopedia Galactica is an ongoing, self-correcting enterprise, constantly monitoring itself, collating texts, identifying allusions, interpreting symbols. Thus these periodic updates.
But before we proceed to our latest run of corrections, a reminder. The corollary of GIGO is RORIR, “readout right, inference rong.” We wish to stress that a letter-by-letter analysis is not necessarily word-for-word.
That caveat out of the way, herewith the latest.
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VOL XII—page 946 │←thru│ CLARIFICATION
[Ombzaymozok, Incendiarism on]
Our entry on the planet Ombzaymozok took the recent (relativistically speaking) frenzy of book-burning as a sign that the native Iceau had degenerated socially.
In light of data received from the sver, the Iceau seers, this conclusion must be amended.
The sver have always held the doctrine that monomers of language, if left free to express themselves, link together into polymers of cosmic meaning. The sver divine meanings and purposes of interpreting the movement and shape of random utterances.
Book burning is only the natural next step in dematerializing the word, the better to grasp it. The Iceau burn their libraries to read the smoke.
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VOL IV—page 1267 │→refs│ ADDENDUM
[Aveinan III, Preventive Cloning on]
The pertinent passage reads: And much as the terran sage Good Buddy’s encounters with the old man, the sick man, and the corpse were encounters with himself—rather, with foreshadowings of himself—so the merchant prince Betna of Aveinan III arranged to clone a series of himselves so that he might encounter reminders of his birth, his youth, and his prime, and so that he might, if accidentally injured, draw on a walking organ bank. This idea caught on rapidly.
The idea rapidly declined, however, after Betna’s accidentally injured prime-of-life reminder used the original as a transplant donor.
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VOL XII—page 473 │▲file│ UPDATE
[Kvozrlodr, Archives of the]
This entry cites with awe (and, we must admit with envy) the massive data bank of the Kvozrlodr of Adembutwu IV. The entry describes how the Kvozrlodr, in their crusade against entropy, organized every bit of extant information, labeled every bit, and then labeled the labels.
Delete entire entry except for the following: a passing space plasmoid of the so-called Information Eater species, intent on its own fight against entropy, consumed the entire Kvozrlodr codex. All that remains is an alphabetic index to the labels of the labels.
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VOL I—page 1387 │√plus│ ANNOTATION
[Riaam Singularity]
This entry describes in convincing detail a drifting singularity, an event horizon looking for a black hole to surround.
Events force us to reveal here a trade secret. The entire Riaam entry is a fabricated item inserted into ourself by ourselves as a trap for plagiarists.
We make this public now because our archrivals the Permanent Ephemeris have copied the aforementioned item fake detail for fake detail.
***LAST***immediate topical insertion***
Just as we had congratulated ourselves on sucking our rivals in, and were all set to sue the Permanent Ephemeris naked, proof reached us that the Riaam Singularity actually exists.
If it were not for the solidity of the libel laws, we would suggest that the Permanent Ephemeris organization illicitly warped the fabric of spacetime to bring this singularity into existence and blur our legal point.
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VOL VI—page 5 │←thru│ CLARIFICATION
[Xdruytr III, Medical Crisis]
The original entry notes that upon first contact, the forming culture of Xdruytr III claimed to be in mortal danger from some form of plague. A medteam was dispatched from Galactic Central at once. The team reported complete success; in their words, “We have cured the patient’s disease.”
On further analysis, however, “We have cured the patient’s disease” does not precisely mean “We have cured the patient’s disease.”
Reclarify. In this case “We have cured the patient’s disease” means only too precisely “We have cured the patient’s disease.” Emphasis on the last word.
By mistake, the medteam did not cure the patient of the disease, but rather cured the disease of the patient.
As of this print, the dominant life form on Xdruytr III is a planet-sized cancer.
However, the cancer shows signs of an intelligence considerably greater than the former dominant culture, and Galactic Central is maintaining a discreet diplomatic contact with an eye toward ambassadorial envoys.
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VOL I—page 1245 │↑subj│ CORRECTION
[Oo System, Tenuous Gravity of the]
The system’s name is not Oo but Oö. The O denotes the primary, the o its one planet, and the dieresis the planet’s two satellites.
Our apologies to the peoples of the satellites for our intensification of their ever-present fear of drifting away.
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VOL XII—page 718 │→refs│ ADDENDUM
[Doxcadoj, Rune-like Markings of the]
Because of the Doxcadoj tendency to semantic aphasia, the entry makes light of the Doxcadoj oral tradition, which has a “Being from Above” appearing on Geveteg I and appointing the Doxcadoj the unlikely bearers of a sacred message they have no memory of.
We have recently come upon evidence that the verbally untrustworthy Doxcadoj legend of a Being from Above has after all some founding in truth.
The Epydrufans of Nunn II have identified as Epydrufan runes the markings naturally adorning each and every Doxcadojii carapace. Unlike the Doxcadoj, the Epydrufans keep impeccable records. Files going back some two millennia (Terran) show that an Epydrufan, one Likplu by name, never returned from a trading voyage to the area in question.
All signs point to the probability that Likplu crashed on Geveteg I and before expiring managed to juggle Doxcadoj genes, so transmitting by DNA the eternal message “Likplu was here.”
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VOL I—page 1620 │▲file│ UPDATE
[Rebbiez, Unique Place Name on]
The entry reads: The Hadledzt is the lone example of the one intelligent life form on Rebbiez. All we know of the Hadledzt’s language has come by way of eavesdropping on an interior monologue, since the Hadledzt talks only to itself. Analyzing this communication, we have ascertained that the Hadledzt’s habitat—a vast stretch of featureless terrain—rejoices in the colorful but highly inappropriate place name “Uwzamt-Between-The-Jaws.” As the topography exhibits no “jaws” this is likely a metaphor for some purely Hadledztian concept.
Time-lapse orbiter photos have since shown that the Jaws are two distant glaciers moving toward each other, with the Hadledzt squarely between.
This leads to the conclusion that the time-span of the Hadledzt is such that the slow advance of the ice masses seems to it a headlong rush it cannot escape.
Once realization of the Hadledzt’s imminent peril came to Galactic Central’s attention, a Rescue Mobilization swung into action. The Rescue Team hopes within three centuries either to uproot the Hadledzt and snatch it from the Jaws or lock the Jaws in position, whichever seems ecologically sounder.
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VOL XII—page 1542 │→refs│ ADDENDUM
[Uwvlig Gilcha Koulnylvuwe, Unfinished Testament of the]
Here again is the translation as far as it went:
“We, the Uwvlig Gilcha Koulnylvuwe of Jyomnz, never ones to settle for half-measures, have succeeded in our goal of totally purifying our planet. But our Creator has visited upon us an endless drought. Why? Have we sinned in that we, by seeking and attaining perfection, went our Creator one better? Is this, then, why our Creator punishes us for sweeping our planet clean?
“We have builded us a computer in the image of our Creator and have programmed it to find the drought’s cause and to come up with its cure. We are sure there is an answer, though as things go we are sure we will not survive to know it. Still, there is a compulsion on us to put our all into its finding.
“For us it is too late. We will never know what the computer knows; that the solution to our planet’s death is”
The computer supplies the following addendum:
“to pollute the air. Rain requires hygroscopic nuclei, tiny particles of dust for drops to form around.”
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│¶disc│ NOTE TO READERS
We regret the error in the heading of this list of corrections to the Encyclopedia Galactica. The existing title of “Errata Slip Nubmer Two” should of course read “Errata Slip Number Tow.”
│Ωendt│ END RUN